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Love Scifi? Love Theatre? Then why not visit London's only SciFi Theatre Festival starting tonight for four nights in Clapham, South London.

​Talos: the Science Fiction Theatre Festival of London is the UK’s first and only sci-fi theatre festival staging science fictional plays from all over the world. After the first festival in 2015, Talos returns to stage even more plays with science fiction and fantasy elements, providing a platform for mind-blowing new writing and testing the boundaries of contemporary theatre.Continue reading →

Ahead of the Eastercon weekend, we have a sociable gathering, including some readings from notable authors, including Andrew Wallace and Stephen Oram. Should be a relaxed and convivial evening, all welcome. Come and join us!

Since October 2015 London has a new genera writers group entitled "Spectrum: The London Science Fiction & Fantasy Writer's Group". It has actually been meeting for a number of years but recently moved to a new online home where it seems to be going fron strength to strength and now has close to 100 members. Continue reading →

On Wednesday 27th January 2016 we'll be trying our best to stream January's Jeff Noon interview, live online. Between now and then a public domain recording of The Planet's by Gustav Holst will be playing and we'd like your feedback on it. Just open the link & let us know what you hear.

A book launch and discussion takes place at the Book and Kitchen in London on Saturday 7th November from 7-9pm.

Science fiction authors, editors and publishers Bill Campbell, Zen Cho, Carmelo Rafala, Stephanie Saulter and Tade Thompson will discuss the ways in which Western ideals and narratives dominated the genre for decades, and how that is now being challenged. Continue reading →

I've been invited this Autumn to deliver a lecture as part of a new series, "King's Fantastic Talks," organised by Dr Rhys Williams. My lecture will take place on 29th October at King's College London's campus and is titled "What's New About the Novum? SF, History, Temporality." The talk builds on my research into Ernst Bloch's utopian philosophy, looking in particular at the concept of the Novum (literally, the New) which he developed as part of his model of anticipatory consciousness (Vorschein). The Novum was extended by Darko Suvin in his influential formalist study of science fiction, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (1979), where Suvin borrowed Bloch's notion of multi-stranded temporal complexity in his examination of the structural ingreidents of science fiction as a genre. However, Suvin elided the explicitly Messianic framework in which Bloch's Novum is grounded – derived from the Jewish tradition of redeeming the past, which is informed by complex messianic futurities germinative within the present time.

I will consider the temporal implications of the Blochian Novum (as well as its similarities with Suvin's later reading) and what this means for our understanding of how the Novum functions in science fiction texts. Whether expressed by a new situation or secondary world, or a de-alienating socio-political perspective in which more egalitarian relations are articulated in a futuristic or fantastical landscape, the Novum should be understood as more than simply "new" narrative actants and settings. Rather, I shall argue, we need to pay attention to the layered temporal possibilities suggested in the structure of the Novum itself: at once anticipatory, utopian, reemptive, messianic, political and subjective.